ShipRecycling Pages:

01 November 2011

Should shipwrecks be left alone?

It is 10 years since a deal to protect the world's
thousands of shipwrecks, but the UK and several other major maritime
powers are yet to ratify it. Should this underwater heritage be protected or is
it acceptable to plunder?

When a ship sinks and lives are lost, it is a
tragedy for the families involved.

For the relatives of the dead, the ship becomes an
underwater grave but as the years pass the wreck can become a site of
archaeological interest.

In recent years technological innovations have
allowed commercial archaeologists, decried by some as "treasure
hunters", to reach wrecks far below the surface.

The most famous of them all, the Titanic, is more
than four miles down and to get there as film director James Cameron has shown,
involves using "robot" divers which are prohibitively expensive -
around $50,000 (£32,000) a day.

Salvage firms are most interested in ships with
cargoes of gold and silver, ceramics or other valuables.

This gold pendant, from South America, was found on the Nuestra Senora de Atocha off Florida

In November 2001, the UNESCO Convention
on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage was finally adopted.

But 10 years on, it still has not been ratified by
the UK, France, Russia,
China or the US, and
commercial archaeologists continue to locate wrecks, remove their cargoes and
sell them off.

"The convention has not been ratified yet
because of the issues it throws up about the cost of implementing and policing
it," a spokesman for the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, says.
"Discussions continue within government, but ratification is not currently
seen as a priority."

In September Britain's Department of Transport
announced it had signed a deal with Odyssey Marine Exploration for the salvage
of 200 tonnes of silver, worth up to £150m, from the SS Gairsoppa, which was
sunk by a German U-Boat in 1941.

The British government will get 20% of whatever
Odyssey recovers but UNESCO says the deal broke the spirit of the convention.

Robert Yorke, chairman of the Joint Nautical
Archaeology Policy Committee, argues the real reason the government, and the
Ministry of Defense in particular, are not ratifying the convention was because
of a misplaced fear about the implications for British warships around the
world.

The internationally recognized concept of
"sovereign immunity" means nations should not interfere with foreign
warships.

Under the Military Remains Act 1986, a number of
British warships around the world are protected, including several ships sunk
during the Falklands conflict. Also covered
are several German U-boats in UK
waters.

This Spanish seal was found on the San Diego, which sank in the Philippines in 1600

There are an estimated three million
wrecks on the seabed.

UNESCO believes attitudes to the exploration of
wrecks are out of step with land archaeology.

"The looting of the tombs of Tutankhamen is
now considered unacceptable, so why the looting of shipwrecks is considered
acceptable?" says UNESCO's Tim Curtis.

Caesar Bita is a Kenyan maritime archaeologist and
an expert on ancient trade between China
and Africa.

He believes he is close to finding the remains of
the legendary fleet of Zheng He. According to stories, a ship from the Chinese
admiral's fleet is thought to have foundered off the coast of Kenya in the
early 1400s.

Bita says the wrecks could provide evidence of
early contact between China
and East Africa.

"Shipwrecks are always under threat all over
the world by people collecting material from the site and the situation in Kenya is not
unique," he says.

Sean Fisher, whose grandfather Mel discovered the
treasure ship Nuestra Senora de Atocha off Florida, says he is not "ashamed to
call himself a treasure hunter."

"Purist archaeologists turn up their noses at
us," he says. "But every artifact we find, whether it's a piece of
pottery, a gold bar or a spike used in the rigging gets treated with exactly
the same care.

"Everybody loves gold and everybody has a bit
of treasure hunter in them but for me the most exciting thing I ever found was
a 400-year-old arquebus (hook gun). It was like bringing history back to
life."

But the idea that mass heritage is at risk is
scaremongering, says Dr Sean Kingsley, a director of Wreck Watch International
and a spokesman for Odyssey.

He argues that the nations which have ratified the
convention represent only 5% of the world's coastline.

The convention only covers wrecks that are over 100
years old, which means the Titanic will only be covered from next year and
ships from World War I and II have no protection.

That is something which concerns naval veterans.

Last month seven European naval associations wrote
a letter to The Times to protest at Dutch salvage firms who they said were
"desecrating" the graves of three British warships, which were
torpedoed off the Netherlands
in 1914, in their search for scrap metal.

But some wartime wrecks have been protected.

The Polish Maritime Office recently placed a 500m
diving exclusion zone around the wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff, which sank in
the Baltic in January 1945. The ship, packed with 10,000 German refugees from
the Eastern Front, was sunk by a Soviet sub. Only 500 survived and it is the
single largest death toll at sea.

In 2006 Australian divers located the wreck of a
Japanese mini-submarine, M24, three miles off Sydney. The sub, which is believed to contain
the bodies of two young Japanese submariners, came to grief after taking part
in an attack on Sydney
harbor in 1942.

The Australian authorities placed a similar 500m
zone around the wreck, monitored by sensitive hydrophones, with a A$1.1m
(£725,587) fine for anyone who interferes with the wreck.

Maritime archaeologist Mark Wilde-Ramsing is
unlikely to get to meet the relatives of those who died on the wreck he is
exploring.

The Queen Anne's Revenge was an English pirate ship
commanded by Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, which sank off the coast
of North Carolina
in 1718.

Many of the exhibits - including pistols, rum
bottles, slave shackles and a surgeon's kit - are now on display at a museum in
North Carolina
but sadly Blackbeard's treasure was nowhere to be found.

But the convention does not just apply to
shipwrecks.

It also covers archaeological sites which are now
underwater, such as Port Royal in Jamaica,
a former pirate harbor once described as the "wickedest city on
Earth", as well as prehistoric sites in the North Sea, and the waters off Alexandria, in Egypt.

But if wrecks and ruins continue to fascinate, what
is the best way to satisfy the public curiosity?

The Mary Rose, which was excavated from the Solent in 1982, will go on display in a new museum

In 1982 the Mary Rose,
flagship of England's King
Henry VIII, was raised from the Solent and next year a £35m museum will open in
Portsmouth.

Some argue it would have been better, in hindsight,
for the Mary Rose to have stayed on the seabed, because of the expensive
chemical treatment needed to preserve the timbers.

"It has created the myth that all shipwrecks
are bottomless money pits and that hull and mass artifact recovery are best
avoided," suggests Dr Kingsley.

Shipwrecks can be significant sites for archaeologists

But Prof Jon Adams, head of maritime archaeology at
the University of
Southampton, strongly
disagrees.

"If it was falling to pieces and nobody came
to see it I'd agree, but its conservation has been a highly successful research
project in its own right and it is one of the most popular maritime museums in
world with over 300,000 visitors a year," he says.

Many experts believe the future is in underwater
trails or virtual museums, where the wreck remains in situ and cameras relay
real-time pictures to a museum on the surface.

Australia is also home to a number of "underwater
heritage trails", with plaques offering information for divers.

In the Dominican Republic a "living
museum" has been set up around the wrecks of two Spanish galleons which
sank during a hurricane in 1724.

The living museum was the idea of Prof Charles
Beeker, of IndianaUniversity.

"We want people to come and visit but to take
only pictures and leave only bubbles," he says.

The wreck of Captain Kidd's pirate ship was discovered off the Dominican Republic

Prof Beeker, who has also discovered the wreck of
Captain Kidd's pirate ship the Quedagh Merchant, said all divers had to be
"sensitive" to the fact that wrecks are essentially graveyards and he
criticized some who took the skulls of Japanese seamen from the many wrecks in
Truk Lagoon in the Pacific.

While it pushes in situ preservation, UNESCO is
hopeful several major countries, including Australia
and France,
might soon ratify the convention to give it more weight.

Dr Kingsley is doubtful and says self-regulation is
the best way forward: "The future is going to be an expensive and unimaginable
journey, a challenge best met by sharing ideas, information and enlightened
management, not by using the UNESCO convention to slap parking tickets' on
robots' windows."

But Prof Adams says self-regulation does not work
and added: "The UNESCO convention represents best practice and is the only
feasible way of protecting underwater cultural heritage in international
waters."

UNESCO convention:

Adopted in Nov 2001
but only came into force in 2009 when the 20th nation - Barbados -
ratified it

Designed to
complement the 1982 UN Law of the Seas, which failed to mention shipwrecks

40 nations have
ratified it but the only major seafaring nations are Spain and Portugal

The convention only
covers wrecks or ruins which are over 100 years old

States are
responsible for ships in their territorial waters but for wrecks in
international waters a number of "interested parties" could be
involved

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